I love Emacs. I don't use it beyond dabbling. The contradiction? I'm not a full-time computer professional. Keeping Emacs stable and running just takes too much bandwidth. It's a tool for dedicated professionals who get a massive return on their investment spent optimizing and maintaining their Emacs setup. Sadly as much as I love the idea of Emacs, I don't personally get enough productivity return to justify the investment. It's not a flaw with Emacs.
Emacs is used by non-computer professionals as well. If your profession relies on the manipulation of text, emacs is the tool to use.
>their investment spent optimizing and maintaining their Emacs setup.
It's really not that bad. Say you're a fiction writer: you only need to figure out your preferred workflow once, but then you can use it for decades with only minimal changes.
Of course, once you get the hang of it, you might think it convenient to be able to write short mails directly, or do a bit of your own typesetting all from the comfort of your, by now, favourite editor, but .emacs files usually see very little churn. What's in a .emacs has usually just accumulated slowly over the years as one's usage of the program increases.
